1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to information publishing and more specifically, relates to interactive information display on a computer screen.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Computer publishing has become a widely accepted way to display information to end-users. There are two major ways to convey information to the end users through a computer system: static display and dynamic display. The static display is similar to traditional newspaper, where the information is displayed page by page on a monitor screen. The dynamic display uses video capabilities of the computer system, where the information is compiled into a video file and later played on a monitor screen.
The static display usually involves downloading information and displaying to the user. All information is usually in one huge file, or at most in two files: one for text information one for graphical information. Usually the information is displayed visually and in one language.
The dynamic display involves downloading video information, usually in a large file. Generally, a user does not have much control over the display of a video file, except for basic mechanic commands such as starting, stopping, and pausing. These controls do not alter the presentation of the displayed material.
For more sophisticated applications, such as on-line comic books or digital instruction manuals, the traditional static display or video display are not adequate. Generally, existing methods of displaying serialized books involve downloading and storing the complete book on the user's computer in a single event. The user then must read the book “as-is” without having the ability to change the book, except for the magnification of all of the book's text. However, in certain kinds of books, such as comic books, the text might appear too small for comfortable reading and, when the user zooms in on the display to facilitate reading the text, much of the comics'graphics are zoomed off of the screen. This causes the user to go back and forth between zooming in and zooming out of the image, which is time consuming and irritating to the user.
Other methods of displaying books download only a single page at a time. The user of this method, upon finishing the reading of a page of the book, is forced to wait for a substantial period of time for a subsequent page to download.
Therefore, there is a need for a method of displaying comic books and similar publications on a computer that allows temporary magnification of the text while preserving the image of the graphics.
There is also a need for a method of displaying comic books and similar publications in which a subsequent page is downloaded to the user prior to the user finishing the reading of an initial page.